What is Ether?

In this blog post, I talk about alchemy, elements of nature as hypothesized by alchemists, and I talk about apothecaries and their nonsense for a bit. In alchemy, ether is one of the five elements. Obviously, none of this is true, but in a period setting, people might believe it. The people in that period (setting) who have worked out the idea of alchemy might actually be honestly trying to describe some aspect of nature they have observed, or one they think they have observed, and they've just observed or described it very poorly. Such is a flaw in a pre-scientific method society. Let's explore this idea.

Alchemy is like chemistry for a less developed culture. Alchemy is a form of pre-chemistry where they still believe strongly in the supernatural. They realized they could mix crap and get other crap, and they must have wondered if they could mix something good. Maybe turn lead into gold or create an elixir that could grant eternal life. It seems fantastic now, but I'm sure it was mostly just a bunch of dudes in powdered wigs in secret labs slowly poisoning themselves with mercury which they called quicksilver. Some of them may have also believed they could create a person, and such a person would be called a homunculus. This belief surely came from observations of salamanders seemingly spawning from nowhere when they set a log in the woods on fire and then a bunch of salamanders scurry away from it which they then believed was somehow a sort of creation phenomenon and attributed it to the element of fire somehow. Like I said, pre-scientific method.

I mentioned five elements. What is an element, and what are the five elements? Why are their five? For our purposes, I think we can say that the word element means an essential, simple, basic part of something. A part of what? A part of anything and everything made of matter. Everything material is composed of elements. The five elements in alchemy are earth, water, air, fire, and ether. I think we have a grasp of the first four, but what about ether? The alchemists rightly identified air and fire as elements distinct elements and separate from a fifth. They probably identified the sun as fire like a candle or a torch, just on another scale. So, what might they have hypothesized or observed that was so odd that they created a fifth category? Spirits. Spirits are made of ether. I shit you not that I am not entirely making this up. A lot of what I'm saying comes from wikipedia articles I half-read a long time ago while farming ideas for RPGs, and as a consequence, I barely understand or remember it.

So ether is a basic, essential material that spirits are made of. Took us a long time to get here. Was it good for you? Let me put it another way. Ghosts are made out of ether. Phew. So far, this is kind of abstract. If we want to understand ether in a concrete manner, we need to be able to describe it with our five senses. What does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? What does it taste like? What does it sound like? Does it give off light? Does it emit heat? Does material pass through it or is it just displaced by material? Does it sound like a delicate whistle, bell, or chime? Does it have an effect on other matter, like how fire burns things? Does ether make plants grow? Does it poison people? Does it sparkle and leave dust behind? Does it leave a glowing slime residue like in the Ghostbusters movie? We could go on, and on, and on!

I think this concept is great because it's a bit ambiguous. We can describe it however we need to suit our setting and our magic system. It's basically magic, whatever THAT is, in its tangible, material form. Ether then becomes an object, a material resource that your characters can discover and fight over or pay for. You can probably make drinks out of it to recover your spent mana points, but when you do, you also vividly see the memories contained in the ether that belonged to the spirits who were once people, plants, or animals, then you forget it like a dream. Trippy.

It's important to note that alchemists really thought they were doing science. No matter how mystic alchemy may seem, the people researching alchemy did not think they were trying to do magic. Other people thought they were doing magic which is why alchemists were hunted like witches. Alchemists were people who lived in a time where the world was still mysterious to people, where people fully believed in the supernatural, and alchemists were just trying to figure things out, including the supernatural thins, and to define it in a way people that could understand. They got a lot wrong. That's not a disclaimer or an admonishment, it's just a fact.

While we're here, an apothecary is a totally different beast from an alchemist. While alchemists were just trying to figure shit out, apothecaries were charlatans hocking opium mixed with random herbs as a pseudo-remedy. If an apothecary sold a medicine called ether, it was probably nothing more potent than tea, or it was tea, or it was tea mixed with opium, or it was some mixture of water with some toxic chemical they didn't understand and opium. Just kidding, opium was probably in a lot of pseudo medicine, but not all pseudo medicine. Unlike apothecaries, alchemists didn't sell their strange concoctions.